Rosie and Me: "...And we have just begun...Watching the river run..." ~ Loggins and Messina

Before Christmas, Jane Thornley http://www.janethornley.com/blog/index.php/site/index/ announced in her Ravelry group that there would be a new KAL (knit-along) after the first of the year and the subject would be "Knit Me A River." That really called to me, so I started gathering yarns and ideas and project names. My possible themes were many, and I narrowed them down to these--

River Songs--Watching the River Run, Peace Like a River, The River is Here, Ol' Man River, Up a Lazy River, Cry Me a River...
Rivers I have known--the Willamette and the Long Tom in Oregon, the Yellowstone and the Firehole and the Snake in Yellowstone, the Missouri in Nebraska, the Feather and the Yuba and the Russian and the American here in northern California....and the rivers of my childhood--the Pecos and the Brazos and the Rio Ruidoso...

As I was planning and thinking about the project, I went to Saori Santa Cruz in January to take a weaving lesson and buy a loom, then home to Texas. When I got back to California, I found that I simply could not knit, but I had not lost interest in the project. So I decided to "weave a river" on my new loom--a loom on which I had only woven one project.

I knew what I wanted to do--a wall hanging or table runner with a "river" running down the middle of it. The river would be formed by inlaid yarns (supplementary weft), meandering along. I liked the theme "Peace Like a River", and decided to go with that.

I wound a 3.5-yard warp in three bouts--here's the warp for the river section--

Using the off-loom cross-holder and threading-holder, I sleyed the reed and threaded the heddles on my desk. I used my 5-dent reed, sometimes using 1 end per dent, sometimes 2 or 3, depending on the size of the yarn.

Then I move the threaded shafts and reed to the loom and wound onto the back beam, using thin corrugated cardboard strips to separate and line up the warp at the front beam, after tying on there--

I began to weave, using the clasped weft technique--the shuttle enters the shed from the right, is thrown across to pick up the other yarn on the left, and is thrown back across in the same shed. So each shed contains two different-colored yarns and each pick is doubled in the shed. As I wove, I also laid in mostly blue-to-white yarns in the "river" area after each double pick. And I chose and cut each inlay from a group of 20 or so yarns, leaving fringe at each end of the inlay--

I had only woven a few inches when I realized that the project had chosen its own name. This was not a "peaceful" river. This was the Rio Ruidoso--it means Noisy Waters!

When I was a child, my family used to vacation in Ruidoso, New Mexico--the closest place to Midland with trees and water and mountains! At that time, it was a sleepy little village in the southern New Mexico mountains. My memories from those vacations include Fox Cave, cherry cider, curio shops, moccasins and Apache dolls and concha belts and turquoise rings...and playing with Daddy at the river -- the Rio Ruidoso. Sittin' in the river was the coolest place in town--